A Produce Reference Guide to Fruits and Vegetables from Around the World: Nature?s Harvest answers the many questions consumers have about various fruits and vegetables. Providing basic, clear, and understandable information for each produce item, this reference guide gives you a synopsis of the fruit or vegetable, a short history of the item, the common and uncommon name, what it looks and tastes like, how it is used, and the time of year it is available. Information on nutrition, serving sizes, yields, and optimal storage conditions is also provided. From potatoes to shepherd?s purse and from grapes to the Clementine tangor, A Produce Reference Guide to Fruits and Vegetables from Around the World covers both the familiar and the exotic. Other than the obvious fruits and vegetables (such as 12 varieties of cherries and 10 different kinds of squash) you?ll also read about herbs, mushrooms, sprouts, and nuts. A Produce Reference Guide to Fruits and Vegetables from Around the World is packed with useful information. From practical advice to interesting trivia, some of the things you?ll learn include: You should not eat any green parts of potatoes--it will make you sick. How to classify a peach--clingstone vs. freestone and white vs. yellow. The Texas 1015 Supersweet onion is named after its recommended planting date, October 15. Kiwis (originally from China, not Australia) contain an enzyme that tenderizes meat. Women in China once made a dye from the skin of eggplants to stain their teeth black. The famous mutiny by Captain Bligh?s crew was caused by breadfruit. Gourds may have spread between continents by floating in the ocean, as they can float in sea water for 220 days without losing seed viability. The two nuts mentioned in the Bible--almonds and pistachios.As new methods in farming, storing, and shipping are allowing exotic fruits and vegetables unheard of a few years ago to becom

Using seasonal checklists and Charles Dowding's expert no-dig advice, this month-by-month journal helps you plan bumper harvests the no-dig way. From tomatoes to basil, carrots to coriander, Charles Dowding, the UK's leading no-dig guru shows you how to grow a year's worth of healthy, organic crops while preserving the soil's integrity in this complete and comprehensive guide. Follow simple steps to find success, growing more than 35 vegetables and herbs in a range of easy and accessible projects suited to all kinds of spaces and environments. Start a no-dig vegetable plot on virgin or dug ground, improve the soil and become an expert mulcher and weeder, as well as learning the techniques for intercropping, companion planting, seed viability and crop succession. This easy-to-follow step-by-step guide by one of Britain's top gardeners is illustrated with photos to help you learn how to plan a vegetable garden, construct a raised bed, sow seed indoors and outdoors in spring, grow on young crops, protect plants from the weather and pests through the season and, finally, celebrate the joy of harvesting. Organised monthly from January to December, this journal is full of key dates for sowing, staking, harvesting and storing, as well as time-saving monthly checklists to help ensure a successful no-dig harvest.

This book brings together the best advice for cultivating fruit trees, berries and shrubs using biodynamic methods, with the aim of harvesting healthy fruit free of pesticides. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer discusses the principles of tree biology before describing the measures that can be taken to develop a pest-free orchard without the use of chemicals, including soil preparation, the selection of trees for planting, issues of transplanting and pruning, the application of pastes, green cover crops, and pest control. Michael Maltas ran fruit tree experiments on his biodynamic farm in Missouri for four years. The results are recorded in a highly practical annual spraying schedule for orchards, which is reproduced in this book. A month-by-month calendar gives information on specific methods and controls, based on Maltas's extensive experience. This is an invaluable book with practical advice on all aspects of planning and maintaining a healthy orchard. This is a thoroughly revised and updated combined edition of 'Biodynamic Treatment of Fruit Trees, Berries and Shrubs' by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer and 'Orchard Pest Management and Spray Schedule' by Michael Maltas. Published in association with the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association of North America.

Ground covers are widely thought of as utilitarian - we turn to them when we have a problem that needs a solution. How fast will it fill an area? Can we put it into the tight spaces between pavers? How much foot traffic can it withstand? Yet these plants also offer a diverse range of beautiful and intriguing options with a variety of colours, textures, and forms. They can unify a landscape, knit together plantings and hardscape, and add extra layers of beauty, dynamism, and surprise. As a replacement for lawns, they can reduce our use of water, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, carbon-based fuels, and transform a yard into a diverse landscape of habitat and food for native insects, birds, and other wildlife. In this meticulously researched reference, nurseryman Gary Lewis profiles more than 4000 ground covers that can perform these roles with aplomb. No matter what kinds of conditions you're facing - shade, dry soil, heavy clay, excess moisture - there's a ground cover that will thrive and beautify your garden. Comprehensive, practical, and copiously illustrated, this indispensable volume belongs on the shelf of every designer, landscape architect, and serious gardener.

Wild Life is an achingly beautiful gift book that introduces the concept of rewilding. No matter whether you live in the mountains, by the coast, along the banks of a river or in the inner-city, this book is your passport to disconnect from one world and reconnect with another; to put down your devices and pick up where your wild self left off. Featuring stunning photography and illustrations that evoke the magic and healing effects of nature, Wild Life offers 50 accessible projects that will bring rewilding into your life. You'll press wildflowers, rewild your garden and create a series of micro adventures in your hometown or city. You'll use the sky to find north and the trees to find your way while out camping and hiking. You'll close your eyes and listen to the birds, kick off your shoes and forage for seaweed. You'll reconnect with your roots, and somewhere along the way, find yourself again.

In this beautiful book, Diana Yakeley shows how to choose and use plants to the best effect, taking into account scale and proportion, style and placement, form and shape, colour, scent and texture. A section on interior ideas explores a range of different rooms and the plants that are most suited to them. There then follows a chapter on planting schemes, including 6 step-by-step projects that reveal how to create your own special displays. The practical aspects of indoor gardening are covered in the final chapter, which contains information on light levels and humidity, potting and pruning, problem busting, containers and tools. There is also a directory, which gives detailed horticultural information on a range of different plants.

This title presents a delightful pack of high-quality flower gift cards and decorative envelopes. A fabulous collection of 20 beautiful flower portrait cards and decorative envelopes. The inside of each card is left blank, to be used for any occasion. Practical instructions on the back of every card describe how to cultivate each plant. Each pack contains 20 greetings cards of 5 designs (each design is shown below).

Medicinal plants and plant-derived medicine are widely used in traditional cultures all over the world and they are becoming increasingly popular in modern society as natural alternatives to synthetic chemicals. As more and more natural remedies are being commercialised, there is a need for a user-friendly reference guide to the plants and their products. The book gives the reader a bird's eye view of more than 350 of the bestknown medicinal plants of the world and their uses, in a compact, colourful and scientifically accurate reference text. It provides quick answers to the most obvious questions: Where does this plant originate? What does it look like? In which culture is it traditionally used? What is it used for? Which chemical compounds does it contain? How safe is it? What is known about its pharmacological activity? What evidence is there that it is effective? The authors also provide short overviews of the various health conditions for which medicinal plants are used and the active compounds (secondary metabolites) found in the plants and their modes of actions.

Marijuana Garden Saver is the go-to field guide designed for growers who need to quickly identify and fix problems and restore plant health. It covers the pests, diseases, environmental stresses and nutrient deficiencies that impact the cannabis garden, threatening a successful harvest.

Marijuana Garden Saver is the resource for all types of gardens, greenhouses and farms:

• Clear photographs help you quickly identify problems indoors and out
• Tells you how to fix problems now, and how to prevent them in the future
• Features organic and safe IPM solutions
• Addresses all major marijuana garden problems

The most trusted name in marijuana cultivation is here to save your garden.

A compact guide to everything bonsai in the internationally best-selling bible format. The Japanese and Chinese have been creating bonsai trees for centuries and it is now an internationally popular pastime. This compact and stylish guide will provide everything you need to know to grow bonsai successfully, including shaping with wires, watering, seasonal maintenance, tackling common ailments, choosing the right container, feeding and repotting. A directory of over 90 of the most popular species, illustrated with beautiful photographs, will enable you to find the tree that is right for you.

As a ready reference for landscape designers and as an indispensable time-saving tool, Landscape Detailing is an essential for the design office.Each section begins with technical guidance notes on design and construction and then provides a list of points against which specifications can be checked. This is followed by a set of drawn-to-scale details sheets. These details can be traced for direct incorporation into the set of contract drawings. A list of relevant British Standards, references, bibliography and a list of associations and institutions indicate where further guidance can be obtained.

In Teaming with Microbes, Jeff Lowenfels revealed the fascinating facts around the soil food web, all the tiny organisms that live in soil and aid a plants growth. In Teaming with Nutrients, he explored how those organisms aid in the uptake of nutrients. And in Teaming with Fungi, he detailed the symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi - the most important organism living in the soil. In his new book Teaming with Bacteria, Lowenfels digs into the new science behind how endophytic bacteria supply nutrients to a large array of plants and explains, in accessible language, how this information applies to home gardeners, small-scale farmers, and cannabis growers. Based on cutting-edge science that will help gardeners increase plant health and productivity, Teaming with Bacteria is a must-have addition to every organic gardener's library.

"Society does not generally expect its farmers to be visionaries." Perhaps not, but longtime Maine farmer and homesteader Will Bonsall does possess a unique clarity of vision that extends all the way from the finer points of soil fertility and seed saving to exploring how we can transform civilization and make our world a better, more resilient place. In Will Bonsall's Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening, Bonsall maintains that to achieve real wealth we first need to understand the economy of the land, to realize that things that might make sense economically don't always make sense ecologically, and vice versa. The marketplace distorts our values, and our modern dependence on petroleum in particular presents a serious barrier to creating a truly sustainable agriculture. For him the solution is, first and foremost, greater self-reliance, especially in the areas of food and energy. By avoiding any off-farm inputs (fertilizers, minerals, and animal manures), Bonsall has learned how to practice a purely veganic, or plant-based, agriculture-not from a strictly moralistic or philosophical perspective, but because it makes good business sense: spend less instead of making more. What this means in practical terms is that Bonsall draws upon the fertility of on-farm plant materials: compost, green manures, perennial grasses, and forest products like leaves and ramial wood chips. And he grows and harvests a diversity of crops from both cultivated and perennial plants: vegetables, grains, pulses, oilseeds, fruits and nuts-even uncommon but useful permaculture plants like groundnut (Apios). In a friendly, almost conversational way, Bonsall imparts a wealth of knowledge drawn from his more than forty years of farming experience. "My goal," he writes, "is not to feed the world, but to feed myself and let others feed themselves. If we all did that, it might be a good beginning."

Paris Park Photographs features spectacular images from a dozen public parks and gardens in and near France's capital city. Exploring many of the same places that photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927) made famous a century ago, Michael Kolster references the pleasures and pitfalls of wandering alone amongst trees and plants and sculpture, unkempt and formally designed places, tempered by the knowledge that the modern world with all its congestion is only a few short steps away. These intimate yet inherently expansive views of Paris's parks invite closer scrutiny of the encounters awaiting us at the edges of the well-worn paths defining our daily lives. Few people venture into the frame of Kolster's photographs, but the promise of a renewed sense of hope and community resides in the details of his visual encounters and the moments of his heightened attention. Each picture speaks to us as a moment in time, even as the sequence suggests a choreography of place, one that can vary daily along with the changing moods and light of each park. Paris Park Photographs is presented in a bilingual English/French edition and concludes with an afterword by Michelle Kuo. Of note is how the book's design is inspired by Walker Evans's 1938 classic work, American Photographs, making Kolster's book of immediate interest to photo and book collectors.

Press your own right at home - homemade oils for cooking and health. The Complete Guide to Seed and Nut Oils is a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated and photographed, full-color guide to growing, foraging, and pressing nut and seed crops to produce high-quality oils for culinary and other uses. Coverage includes: A brief history of seed oil extraction Culinary and health benefits of home-pressed oils versus factory produced oils Presses and other equipment options for ease, cost, and convenience How-to for growing, harvesting, processing, and pressing nuts and seeds Profiles of over 40 nuts and seeds to grow, forage, or source including hempseed, flax, peanuts, sunflowers, walnuts, okra, and more. Oil processing, storage, and culinary and other uses Scaling up for community or small-scale commercial production. Whether you want to produce oils for cooking, balms and salves, self-sufficiency and resiliency or for small-scale commercial or community production, The Complete Guide to Seed and Nut Oils is a one-stop shop to get you started.

This volume discusses gardens as designed landscapes of mediation between nature and culture, embodying different levels of human control over wilderness, defining specific rules for this confrontation and staging different forms of human dominance. The contributing authors focus on ways of rethinking the garden and its role in contemporary society, using it as a crossover platform between nature, science and technology. Drawing upon their diverse fields of research, including History of Science and Technology, Environmental Studies, Gardens and Landscape Studies, Urban Studies, and Visual and Artistic Studies, the authors unveil various entanglements woven in the past between nature and culture, and probe the potential of alternative epistemologies to escape the predicament of fatalistic dystopias that often revolve around the Anthropocene debate. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental and landscape history, the history of science and technology, historical geography, and the environmental humanities.

Landscapes of material are also landscapes of meaning: praxis is itself symbolic, and all landscapes are symbolic in practice. Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective draws together fifteen historical geographers to examine landscapes as messages to be decoded, as signs to be deciphered. The range of examples is wide in terms of period, from the medieval to the modern, and of place, embracing the USA, Canada, Palestine, Israel, South Africa, India, Singapore, France and Germany. Each essay addresses a specific problem, but collectively they are principally concerned with the ideologies of religion and of politics, of Church and state, and their historical impress upon landscapes. The book is introduced by an essay which explores the dialectical understanding of landscapes, and landscapes as expressions of the connection of an ideology to a quest for order, to an assertion of authority and to a project of totalization. The issues raised by landscapes and their meanings - issues of individual and collective action, of objective knowing, of materialist and idealist explanation - are fundamental not only to historical geography but to any humanistic study, and render the geographical study of landscapes of interest to scholars in many disciplines.

The Cut Flower Garden: Erin Benzakein is a florist-farmer, leader in the locaflor farm-to-centerpiece movement, and owner of internationally renowned Floret Flower Farm in Washington's lush Skagit Valley. A stunning flower book: This beautiful gardening book and guide to growing, harvesting, and arranging gorgeous blooms year-round provides readers with vital tools to nurture a stunning flower garden and use their blossoms and cut flowers to create show-stopping arrangements. It makes a beautiful gift for any occasion, for friends, loved ones and gardening lovers alike! Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden: Cut Flower Garden is equal parts instruction and inspiration-a flower gardening book overflowing with lush photography of magnificent flowers and breathtaking arrangements organized by season. Find inspiration in this lush flower book: Irresistible photos of Erin's flower farm that showcase exquisite blooms Tips for growing in a variety of spaces and climates Step-by-step instructions for lavish garlands, airy centerpieces, and romantic florist design and decor for every season If you liked Paris in Bloom, you'll love Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden.

Desert Paradises: Surveying the Landscapes of Dubai's Urban Model explores how designed landscapes can play a vital role in constructing a city's global image and legitimizing its socio-political hierarchy. Using the case study of Dubai, Bolleter explores how Dubai's rulers employ a paradisiacal image of greening the desert, in part, as a tool for political legitimization. Bolleter also evaluates the designed landscapes of Dubai against the principles of the United Nations and the International Federation of Landscape Architects and argues that what is happening in Dubai represents a significant discrepancy between theory and practice. This book offers a new perspective on landscape design that has until now been unexplored. It would be beneficial to academics and students of geography, landscape architecture, urban design and urban planning - particularly those with an interest in Dubai or the many cities in the region that are experiencing Dubaiification.

This book is the first study of the portico and its decorative program as a cultural phenomenon in Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a largely neglected group of porticoes decorated with painted pergolas that appeared in Rome and environs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it tells the story of how an element of the garden-the pergola-became a pictorial topos in portico decoration, and evolved, hand in hand with its real cousin in the garden, into an object for cultural emulation among the educated patrons of early modern Rome. The liminality of both the portico and the pergola at the interface of architecture and garden is key to the interpretation of these architectural and painted forms, which rests on the intersecting frameworks of the classical tradition, natural history, and the cultural identity of the aristocracy. In the mediating space of the Renaissance portico, the illusionism pergola created an art gallery, a natural history museum, and a virtual garden where one could engage in leisurely strolls, learned conversations, appreciation of art, and scientific investigation, as well as extensive travel across time and space. The book proposes the interpretation that the illusionistic pergola was an artistic formula for the early modern perception of nature.

This is a directory of plants whose greatest attributes in the garden lie in their form and foliage, not merely in their flowers. Ornamental foliage plants for your garden features over 2000 plants from all over the world, many of which are useful cultivars, varieties or forms. They have been selected for their value in the landscaping of gardens, be they big or small. Their claims to fame may be their architectural form, their intriguing texture, their unusual habit, their miniature or immense size, or their suitability for a particular situation, such as for topiary, a conservatory or to provide winter colour. Many plants have been chosen for their striking leaves, which may be patterned, enormous, dissected or magnificently coloured. Every entry has notes on cultivation and use, and is coded to correspond with the climatic zones of the world map at the front of the title. There are at least 1000 colour photographs and 600 line drawings. Gardeners and landscapers have become increasingly aware of how easy foliage plants are to care for and what a magnificent palette they provide for simple, clean garden design. Many lend themselves to small formal gardens for urban spaces, while trees and mass plantings can give perspective and interesting effects in larger gardens. Style is often a matter of restraint and the judicious use of foliage plants sometimes brings to a garden a greater sense of peace and relaxation than one cluttered with colourful flowers.

The contribution of diplomatic, military, and naval exploits in the formation of the British Empire are well recorded, but far less well-known are those of botanic gardens which, in their own unsung way, helped to underpin the Empire's commercial success and were also instrumental in furthering botanical knowledge around the world. Christian Lamb, distinguished plantswoman and garden historian, writes in her introduction "It so happens that I 'collect' botanic gardens . . . this book is a nebulous collection of a few chosen botanic gardens from the vast array available--the stars in their spheres . . . and the remarkable array of the often learned and entrepreneurial characters that created them."

Growing flowers from seed is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to supplement your borders, bringing instant colour to tired gardens. Many of these flowers are also ideal for cutting, so within a single growing season you can produce armfuls of beautiful blooms to cut and bring inside the house. Author Clare Foster and photographer Sabina Ruber have been experimenting with growing flowers from seed for several years. In this book they pass on that invaluable experience, explaining how and when to sow and grow a huge range of flowers from Aquilegia to Zinnia.